The Good General must be turning in his tumba. First, the last statue of him still standing in Madrid is hauled away in a most undignified manner. (Apparently there are now only two statues left in Spain, one in Santander and one in Zaragoza - but Izquierda Unida tells us that there are 167 references to the Franco regime in public places in Madrid alone - in street and school names, for example.) And now, there's talk of converting his greatest architectural legacy, an awful monument to awfulness, into a memorial for his victims. The Francisco Franco Foundation (a website designed with the same good taste and restraint as the Valle de los Caídos) has its own ideas about the removal of the statue, calling it "a belligerent act by Zapatero against Spanish history". That sounds about right. Sometimes, history benefits from a little belligerence.

(Today's title, by the way, is to celebrate the conference on the music of the Smiths in Manchester next week. Morrissey would probably be turning in his grave too, if he was dead.)
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It's official: Madrid has the 63rd most impressive city skyline in the world. And that was probably before the 106 m. high Edificio Windsor burned down last month. Changing cityscapes: I was out walking a couple of weekends ago with my wife and as we were walking past one of the older buildings in our barrio, a wonderful cube-shaped thing that has slowly been emptying as its inhabitants have been dying, I said: "I hope they don't tear this down". Well, the next day, they did (see picture).

I'm off to Seville until the weekend. So a Happy Easter to all our reader.
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...Where "Hugo" is one of the most popular choices of name. I've met someone by the name of everyone on this list, but I must confess that I have yet to meet a "Nereas".
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Photographed at Atocha railway station, March 12th 2005, the day after the first anniversary of the attacks. "With all Affection from the Islamic Cultural Center of Madrid". Someone has written "I don't believe it", but this has been crossed out: to the left, it says "I DO believe it". 
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The four-day summit on terrorism in Madrid having ended with the “Madrid Agenda” – the list of conclusions drawn from the summit, which can be summed up by the idea that more democracy will equal less terrorism - today has been a day of busy remembrance in Madrid, following the terrorist attacks of a year ago. At 12 o’clock, the city (and much of Spain and Europe) observed a five-minute silence; there have been memorial services big and small, though the families of many victims have apparently preferred to get out of the city for a few days rather than have to relive it all again. At 7.37 a.m., which is the time the first bomb exploded, Madrid's 650 churches rang their bells for five minutes in memory of the missing. The Bosque de los Ausentes, 192 cypress and olive trees, has been opened in the Retiro Park: a cellist played Pablo Casals’ “Song of the Birds” at the memorial service held there. Candles have been lit, flowers been left, prayers been said and tears shed at the places where the bombs exploded. The press has gone mad, needlessly interviewing people traveling on the same train this morning about how they feel, even thrusting microphones into the faces of children for their opinions. The newspapers all contain special supplements or articles telling us that terrorism is a bad thing, and DVD’s have appeared on the newsstands, their release delayed, perhaps cynically, until the first anniversary was upon us. The state channel, at least ended its evening new bulletin with some dignity, showing the names of the 192 victims scrolling over a black background rather than the supposedly “iconic” images of grief and cheesy music used by the other channels. There was even silence in Congress, where the politicians who have been slinging mud at each other over this for the last few months did the decent thing and shut up for once. The Guardian reports: “Spain's 1m-strong Muslim community yesterday issued what it called the world's first fatwa against Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaida which has been linked to the Madrid train bombings […] It requires him to be condemned and al-Qaida banned "as part of Islam.” And this, from Timothy Garton Ash writing in The Observer, is worth reflecting on. “Perhaps the most impressive thing the Spanish people have done in the year since the “11-M” attacks is the thing they haven't done. They have not struck back, scapegoating Moroccans or Muslims of any nationality. A recent report by Human Rights Watch pays this cautious tribute: ‘To our knowledge, there have not been any clearly documented cases of racist violence that can be attributed directly to the March 11 bombings.’ It goes on to quote the president of the association of Moroccan workers and immigrants in Spain: ‘The reaction has overall been exemplary, that of a society that knows how to distinguish between a few terrorists and a community.” That’s the spirit. Still perhaps the most eloquent, sanest testimony on the whole thing has come from Pilar Manjón, who represented the victims at the December investigation into the attacks. Addressing the commission and indirectly the politicians of Spain, she said she wasn’t interested in why the Popular Party had lost the elections. She was interested in why she had lost her 20-year old son. Then she simply asked the politicians to make it possible for Spanish citizens to leave their houses in the mornings safe in the knowledge that they would return there at the end of the day. Her speech in full (in Spanish) is here (PDF).

Imagine you were a Spanish journalist, or just someone interested in reading about Spanish matters in Spanish. You might want access to international, national and regional newspapers, radio stations, blogs and encyclopaedias. You might want to look at the Invisible Internet or a Dictionary of Proverbs, you might want to know about films or search the contents of libraries. Well, this might be the sort of thing. It's been around since 2000 and my life would have been a lot easier if I'd known about it. Beware: beautifully designed it is not.

This news site, on the other hand, is very beautiful indeed and is in fact generally rather wonderful. "10x10," its policy statement declares, "runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds." Well, it might have no agenda, but I don't think it can help having politics.
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PdS Blog goes temporarily French. If you love Paris, you'll love these beautiful pictures of the flooding there in 1910. What's that in the background? (via Blogdex.)

And did you know that it requires permission to take a picture of the Tower at night?
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"The Government may feel relieved: the worst, turnout below 40%, did not happen. However, results are close enough to that threshold to make the most pro-Europeans worry. Inside Spain, the Government is questioned because it did not efficiently manage a communication strategy to get more than half of the voters to the polls; abroad, the Government does not have much more capital than it would have been afforded by a parliamentary ratification; from the collective standpoint, the people have confirmed the existence of a gap between them and the political class in regard to Europe."

Post-referendum reflections, part of a longer piece from the bi-lingual Real Instituto Elcano. For language and culture issues, this is the most useful part of the site.
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Francisco Aragón has written a bilingual collection of poetry with a fabulous title and some fabulous poems. "Madrid in July" begins "The whirling breath/of dryers left open", which is about right. The "whirling" is what makes the difference there. It's full of nice observations like this. But he also tackles the big themes with elegance - "Klein on Mourning" was one I particularly enjoyed. It's a nice book to have, and I'd say a particularly nice book for everyone who's bilingual or would like to be.
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Another Madrid landmark, a bit of a Transición icon, is about to bite the dust, and it's blaming CD piracy and Internet downloads for the damage. What will go in its place? Not McDonald's, at least - there's already one right next door. Mark my words, it'll be the Prado next.

Meanwhile, Spanish soccer coach Luis Aragonés has been fined €3000 (about $4000) for his racist remarks before the game against England in November. $4000? That'll hurt him no end.
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